Stand up too quickly and you might see stars. Analysing the area of the brain that creates these tiny flashes of light could help blind people to see. If certain areas of the brain that process visual information are activated – by a blow to the head, for example – tiny stars of light appear in vision. People experience such “phosphenes” even if their eyes are closed or they are blind. Peter Schiller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues stimulated these brain areas in monkeys to determine what the phosphenes look like to them and where they appear in line of sight.
